Copper Canyon Press | 2022 | 96 pages
In the final days of my husband Barry Lopez’s life, as he was fading in and out of consciousness, we talked about the last voices he wanted to hear over the telephone. One of those was John Freeman, a young man whose quick-silver mind and spirit Barry regularly sought out. On a late December afternoon, I got John on the phone and hovered nearby while the two men spoke. The conversation lasted a few minutes until Barry was dozing again, his head sunk heavy in the pillow, his eyes sunk in their sockets. When I picked up the phone to say goodbye, John sounded perplexed. “Are you in California?” he asked me. No, we were in the small house we’d rented after a wildfire in the McKenzie River Corridor booted us from our home and our property, a house where where my husband would die the following day, on a freezing cold Christmas evening. But Barry had told John we were, instead, in Marin County under a blazing blue sky, have returned from riding horses down a sandy beach with the requisite wind in our hair. In that moment of numb grief, facing an emptiness that confounds me still, I was delighted by my husband’s image of warmth and freedom, of liberation. Of the two of us together, in peace.
I’m not surprised that Barry delivered this flight of fancy to his friend John, given their long discussions over the years about aesthetics and love, about grace. Also about how we might, as a culture and as individual communities, bear the series of ongoing environmental/cultural crises that will only intensify in the future. I trust it’s not presumptuous for me to say that this decade-plus conversation, with themes of witness and intimacy as well as antidotes for despair, have woven their way into John’s brilliant new collection, Wind, Trees.
Last spring, my daughters and I, along with a gathering of loved ones, dug a small hole near a boulder that had cracked during the fire, which sits between two charred fir trees on our former land on the McKenzie. We poured in Barry’s ashes. John was there with his partner Nicole, and once the hole was filled again with soil, he read “Dusk,” the poem he’d written for Barry soon after that last phone call and several months after the fire burned entire hillsides of ancient Douglas fir and cedar trees, Barry’s truck, and several structures, including the archive building where he stored 50 years of material from his writing life. The poem is part of John’s new collection, and taps into the devastation of our fire, while extending out to the ravaging of the West, the too-many conflagrations that seem to be everywhere now. “Maybe / endless love awaits us. I know you believed / so, even as forests and rivers turned to fire, libraries to ash.”
What strikes me about this particular poem, as well as many others in the volume, is its humility. Its refreshing lack of cynicism when (for some of us, me included) cynicism has become the jerk reaction, the easy means of coping with what ails us. John Freeman instead probes the depths of human affinity and the value of guidance without over-celebrating a given poem’s subject. As he writes of Barry, “Now that you’re not here / to tend them, the lamps you lit remain for us. / Sometimes it’s important to see the darkness, / you would say, to regard one another, / and our trembling.”
I noticed how several poems in this volume, not just the one written in Barry’s honor, ask us to turn to generational wisdom, which John reminds us that we ignore to our own peril. One of those is the striking prose-poem “Colors”: “… This in a color-starved part of the world. Maybe that’s what she was looking at, this woman, / trapped forever in 1894, squinting not out at a world of / worry, but perhaps at a world printed on the back of her eye, one full of colors.”
Also, the enchanting single-sentence poem, “The Secret Country,” asking us to recall, as many of John Freeman’s poems do, the tactile sensations of our everyday lives: “Before they go the way of Checker cabs / rotary phones, cassette tapes or bootjacks, / let’s remember that riding to work on the upper deck / of a London bus as it brushed the skirted canopy / of trees in late spring was like stepping / into the green-lit rooms of shade and wonder / we’d been promised as children, scratch / of branches along its red roof, the whoosh / of leaves music to a den we need to move / past to see we’ve been living in it all along.”
I’m not a poet, nor was Barry (lyrical though his prose was), but I can’t fathom living in a home without books of poetry piled here and there. As a couple, we made sure that certain shelves in our library were devoted to poetry and one of our favorite games with our grandchildren when they were younger was to each pull a book off the shelf to randomly recite a poem to the others. I remember our nine-year-old granddaughter reading Merwin’s “Thanks” on one of those afternoons. Suffice it to say: not a dry eye in the house.
I mention this in part because, though Freeman’s style is distinct and most certainly all his own, there is a Merwinesque quality running through the book. An ability to call out our dire circumstances (“Amazing, how finely tuned the / ears of real power are to / the winds of danger) while expressing a compassion for those who suffer, now and down the road (I didn’t need to answer, I was / there to accept the world was going to punch. To remember / it may not mean harm / but that’s precisely why I needed / to be ready for when it would.”).
Though I admit it’s primarily the Lopez resonance I sought out while reading Wind, Trees. I can’t take in “Friendship,” for instance, without remembering our McKenzie River trees, now gone; how the wind whistles in a different way through the half-empty forest. I remember firefighters on our doorstep, shouting at us to get out. Barry gunning our car down the driveway, both of us realizing that the home we knew was gone forever. “Now I worry you’re keeping vigil over the smoking / tree line,” John writes, “Knowing when the roar of fire gets close / it’s time to go.”
And I certainly can’t read “Voices” without a searing reminder of my own passage through grief. “… what trick of evolution gave us this ability to soothe ourselves / with the sound of our departed there is no such thing / as a swan song when one dies its other half simply goes briefly silent…”
I won’t ever know, obviously, what passed between these two men as they sat together, as they leaned into each other, but whatever it was, I’m thankful for it. Barry was lighter, more hopeful, after speaking with John Freeman, and I like to believe that with Wind, Trees, John’s long conversation with his dear friend continues.
Debra Gwartney is the author of two book-length memoirs, Live Through This, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and I Am a Stranger Here Myself, winner of the River Teeth Nonfiction Prize and the Willa Award for Nonfiction. Debra has published in such journals as Granta, The Sun, Tin House, American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, VQR, and others. She is the recipient of two Pushcart prizes and her essay, “Fire and Ice,” was recently selected for Best American Essays. She is co-editor, along with her husband Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. She lives in Western Oregon.
Read “Buried Lives and Divided Selves,” an interview with Debra Gwartney appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by LUM3N, courtesy Pixabay.
